The classic question to find out whether you're a pessimist or an optimist is whether you think your glass is half empty or half full.

Saying half empty and therefore being seen a pessimist would be regarded as the more negative of the two. But a characteristic most people would regard as negative doesn't have to be seen that way.

If you can find the silver lining, you can turn a negative into a positive and a pessimist into a realist.

Alexandra Wesnousky of New York University found in a study that more than 90% of people are inclined to see some sort of positive attribute associated with a typically negative trait.

She then decided to find out if seeing the positive in a negative might actually be beneficial.

The participants in the test took an impulsiveness survey. Afterwards, some participants were told they'd scored very high on the test, suggesting they were impulsive individuals, while others were told they'd scored very low.

Next the researchers led some of test participants to believe that impulsivity had a silver lining of making you more creative. These participants read a fake news article that cited scientific evidence to support the impulsive-creative connection. Other participants, meanwhile, read a fake news article refuting that link.

Finally, the test participants all completed an “alternative uses” task. A standard measure of creativity that asks people to list novel uses for common household items.

The results showed participants in the group who were told they were impulsive and who read about its “silver lining” scored higher on the creativity test than those who didn't.

So in a nutshell, telling people they were impulsive and that being impulsive was connected with being more creative, actually had the effect of making people more creative.

Of course this isn't really a hack you can do on yourself, but you could use it to help colleagues find the positive in a negative.